Korean-American MCs Kero One (left) and Azure are two of the most influential DJ-producer-rappers you've never heard of.5AM

Sipping milk tea in the heart of Little Tokyo, Los Angeles on a Friday night, underground rap veterans Kero One and Azure debated the answer to arguably the most heated question in the music industry: How easy is it to be an independent artist in 2017?

“For my generation, hip-hop was a secret art form,” Kero started, recalling his friend's binder full of hip-hop drum sample credits, printed straight from Kinko's pre-Internet. “If you wanted to learn how to do things like produce, rap or breakdance, you had to have a really close friend take you to hiphop events in person and watch DJs, dancers and MCs do it in person. That was it. There was no YouTube, and we didn’t have knowledge at our fingertips that easily. So if you ask someone like me, of course my first response is going to be that it’s way too easy to to do hip-hop these days and be heard on a commercial level.”

“As far as revenue goes, though, that’s where the game has been flipped back,” countered Azure. “There was a five- to ten-year renaissance period of independent freedom in rap, with rappers like Wiz Khalifa and Wale pioneering the notion of having a successful career even if you’re not signed to a major. But that wave only went so far. Now everyone’s scrambling to sign with majors again, and the streaming economy has basically turned into the majors’ way of clamping our balls and closing the doors on us again. Now you have to be incredibly big to make any kind of money.”

Contrary to what often plays out in music-industry headlines, these two perspectives can thrive in coexistence—especially through a creative lens. Both Kero and Azure are Korean-American DJ-producer-rappers who grew up skateboarding in the Bay Area, but on opposite ends of the music industry's latest digital disruption: Kero released his first EP Check The Blueprints in 2003, four years before SoundCloud was founded, while Azure posted his first solo track on the streaming service in 2013. They paused for a break in Little Tokyo on the eve of the release party for their first eponymous collaborative album, Kero & Azure, which was distributed last month via Kero's own label and concert promotion imprint PLUG.

Artistically, the collaboration is a grand exercise in mixing modern sensibilities with old-school, funk-inspired sounds. The duo sourced many of their beats from old Zip drives on Kero's Ensoniq ASR-10, a sampling keyboard last manufactured in the late '90s. Honest lyrics like "I don't really make trap music / 'Cause my destiny has set me free" declare their independence from top-40 trends, while others like "If you follow through with your Venmos, you a real one" cement their position in modern pop culture.

Perhaps more compelling is the album's distribution: the only physical copies of Kero & Azure in existence are nowhere to be found in the U.S., but rather sit under a miniature billboard at Tower Records in Japan, a market where over 77% of music sales still come from CDs and vinyl records. In contrast, the duo's release strategy in the U.S. is 100% digital, marking a clear departure from previous PLUG releases and riding the wave of streaming services' pivotal domination of the domestic market.

While you may have never heard of Kero or Azure by name before, both rappers are as high-influence as they are low-key, which empowers them to navigate an album release strategy that is simultaneously global and no-frills. When Kero first started promoting shows in Little Tokyo under his PLUG umbrella, artists from Just Blaze (a producer boasting prolific credits with Jay Z, Beyoncé and Kanye West) to Mixed by Ali (Kendrick Lamar’s tour DJ and Top Dawg Entertainment’s in-house mixing engineer) came through his doors to perform; he later played live alongside Stevie Wonder and received a personalized, public video of praise from will.i.am. Yet, the rapper still has approximately 120,000 subscribers across Spotify, SoundCloud and YouTube, and over 113,000 followers across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram—a modest number by mainstream standards.

Similarly, Azure spent much of his early career honing his skills and beefing up his network behind the scenes, prioritizing craft over publicity. As the DJ for Bay-Area hip-hop collective HBK Gang—which counts both local indie rappers like Iamsu! and P-Lo and major-label stars like Kehlani and Sage the Gemini among its members—Azure was responsible for providing the sonic backbone to many of his crewmates' cross-country tours, yet often went unmentioned in public histories of the group.

Nonetheless, both Kero and Azure's skills behind booths and screens prepared them well for carving out their own niche in the spotlight. After all, “hip-hop is moved by producers,” HBK Gang’s manager Stretch toldBuzzFeed in 2014. “If you don’t have an identifying producer or an identifying sound, it's not gonna work.”

With the case of Kero & Azure, the duo's "identifying sound" is jazz hop or jazz rap, a hybrid genre originating in the late 1980s that has experienced a resurgence in recent years thanks to ambitious records by the likes of Kendrick Lamar, A Tribe Called Quest and The Roots. Japanese DJ-producers such as DJ Mitsu The Beats, DJ Okawari and the late Nujabes are also credited with pioneering the genre, which helps to explain Kero & Azure's popularity across the Pacific Ocean.

In fact, one can trace their overseas connections to Kero's first big break as a rapper, when one of the 50 copies he printed of Check the Blueprints got picked up by top underground DJs in Japan. He connected with Japanese indie label P-Vine Records and got signed to Universal Music Publishing in Asia, which has charted the trajectory for much of his recent career: he hit #5 on the iTunes Japan charts with his 2015 album Reflection Eternal, produced a #1 jazz hop hit in Korea for Park Kyung,and toured with Korean hip-hop staple Epik High.

Even as streaming offers more transparency into global listening activity, international traction often remains sporadic and unpredictable; for instance, American singer-songwriter LP's 2016 single "Lost on You" went platinum and raced up Shazam charts in Greece, despite selling only a few thousand unit equivalents in the U.S. Kero saw a similar, unregulated lift in popularity in April 2016, when Korean longboarder Ko Hyojoo posted a video of herself skating to the rapper's 2011 single “So Seductive.” Kero reposted it on FB, to the tune of over 26 million views to date.

With his label PLUG, Kero plans to turn this unpredictability into an asset, intentionally seeking international collaborators and pushing releases into more Asian markets—refusing to let his perceived "easiness" of the digital music world detract from his core vision. The bonus track on Kero & Azure features a verse from one of the members of Kandytown, a Japanese hip-hop outfit signed to Warner Music Group; future collaborators on the books include Taiwanese artists Trout Fresh and Julia Wu. “I’m trying to do bonus tracks for every country right now,” Kero told me.

In contrast, Azure has not visited Korea in over 15 years, and intentionally avoided penciling his Asian heritage into his earlier work. “The few Asian rappers who came up when I was in middle school always put on this facade of being a thug or gang member,” he told me. “I think that made it seem corny and fake for a while."

He credited rappers like Mac Miller and Chance the Rapper with breaking conventional rap archetypes, which then, in his words, "gave Asian-American artists permission to just let themselves be themselves. I’ve realized that incorporating Asianness into your art doesn’t have to be just about having tons of Asian people in your music videos. It’s about showing how you were raised, and contributing your unique perspective on the world. I think I am part of the wave that started that.”

Perhaps even more than Kero, Azure is a staunch, outspoken independent—a self-declared "rapper with his own agenda" determined to "stay in this lane that, in a lot of ways, we're digging ourselves." Much of this perspective stems from his early experiences DJing and touring with HBK Gang, and getting a front-row seat to witnessing the lives of mainstream artists.

“A lot of these rappers were getting million-dollar deals from labels like Atlantic and Def Jam, but I was looking at them like, sure, you have a home and you’re still buying Jordans and bottles at the club, but all of the gold chains in your videos are actually somebody else’s, and you’re still having trouble paying everyone on tour," Azure told me. "That was one of the biggest lights turned on for me, in terms of realizing that a lot of these big, major-label artists are still living modestly and barely scraping by, even if it’s big paycheck to big paycheck.”

Conversely, both Kero and Azure are on a mission—lyrically and sonically with their tracks, and financially with their career trajectories—to debunk the myth of the powerless independent. “There’s a stereotype that there are only two categories of musicians: super successful multi-millionaires, and artists who are literally starving,” agreed Kero. “There’s still a substantial middle ground of artists who are actually living comfortably and making it happen creatively. I see it as sort of like teaching: you can get your decent paycheck, but also love what you do.”

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I'm an award-winning music writer and researcher, passionate about propelling innovation in the music industry using a combination of in-depth business acumen and data-driven storytelling. I take particular interest in how emerging music markets, technologies, leaders and ta...